Peter Johnson wrote:Great news, Mark. Downloading it now. I suspect it will give Eclipse a run for its money, so to speak .

And you've hit the nail on the head. It can be a real killer to compete with free. Especially when the industry trend is not only towards free software, but free programmers. Or at least as close as possible in the offshore location of your choice. Software I used to not think twice about buying now comes to a decision between professional tools and groceries.

I'll admit to being an Eclipse-head, myself, however. IDEA does bog-standard apps really well. However, my tastes tend to more complex environments, where Eclipse is somewhat more capable. E.g., other languages than Java, complex webapp configurations (which is why I'm so irked that sysdeo is moribund, considering how useless WTP is), and linking multiple apps together and debugging them as a system.

Technically, IDEA has always been free, in a way. Just not open source. You can always go download the next unreleased version and use it. The newest features may not all work but the existing features are all quite stable.

I think it's a smart move by Jetbrains. Not just that it is free, but that they open sourced it. Believe it or not, not everyone's development world revolves around web applications.

I beg to differ here, after really using Eclipse for our web development at my current job. I spent way more time wasting on Eclipse because its capabilities had many bugs keeping things in memory that I already changed. Especially when you add the Groovy Eclipse plugin. Anyway, using IntelliJ I no longer waste so many hours on IDE problems.

As far as enterprise development and integrated environments IntelliJ is just as powerful and without the issue I had with Eclipse.

YMMV. It's not really fair to judge a product by its plug-ins, though. Especially since back around IDEA6 (last time I used it daily), the number and quality of their plug-ins was pretty miserable. They didn't play together at all well.

Of course, Eclipse is pretty much all plug-ins. Just some of them are part of the core distro. About the only 2 I really can't abide in the stock set are the eternally flaky XML editor and WTP, which I've already maligned enough for one week. Ironically, one reason I hate WTP so much is that it's too much like IDEA's webapp debugging environment. Which works great for simple web projects, but not so good (last time I used it) when you're providing lots of external context info.

I think I detect some frustration with the fact that Eclipse doesn't automatically pick up on external filesystem changes (apparently due to some sort of "Write Once/Run Anywhere consideration); and possibly that the Groovy plug-in is shirking its responsibilities on updating from internal changes. Which would be their own fault. I haven't worked with that one, so I can't say. On the plus side, I prefer having my classes written out to the filesystem without having to force the process, and I haven't felt obliged to keep an OS File Explorer window open alongside Eclipse to look at objects that the IDE doesn't consider to be worthy of display. Which may sound ironic, considering that many Eclipse perspectives do their own censoring, but fortunately, there's still the general object View.

A bad plugin is a bad plugin, though, regardless of platform. I've recently come to despise a certain very expensive (non-open source) plug-in from a certain very large company because it looks like someone budgeted 6 weeks and 1.5 lakhs to ram what originally ran somewhere else into Eclipse and it doesn't integrate at all well.

But I'm not here to act as an unpaid salesman for a competitor. While I find Eclipse more suited for the kinds of stuff that I like to do, IntelliJ is about the only commercial IDE left standing for a good reason. It's a good product, has great support for common Java development needs (and I really did love their Swing design stuff), and is certainly nothing to be sneered at. They have a job I don't envy, and I wish them well.

Many thanks for the good news, Mark. If IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition is better than Eclipse IDE, I might change to use it.
Eclipse is not an IDE to begin with, Eclipse IDE is just a plugin of Eclipse Platform. It's not so intelligence partly because it's not solely an IDE.

Looking at the feature list it would appear that the community edition is a glorified text editor. Considering that I use Eclipse mainly as a glorified text editor (I find some of the Eclipse wizards helpful, but many of them are useless time wasters), IDEA just might be to my liking.

On the plus side, I prefer having my classes written out to the filesystem without having to force the process

Not sure what you mean here, but I don't have to force the process in IntelliJ, it automatically saves to the file, because it also keeps a history internally so you can revert back changes.

I do like Eclipse Hibernate plugin better than IntelliJ, but they both do the same things, just that Eclipse's Hibernate plugin is a little easier to configure.

Mark

I think you're referring to the Java files. I mean the compiled classes themselves, which, unless things have changed, are kept solely in memory in IntelliJ and only written to disk if you explicitly tell it to do so, unlike Eclipse which always compiles to disk. The only real difference is that if you intend to execute the classes outside the IDE, you have to make sure IntelliJ has put them somewhere where your external environment can use them.

As far as ORM plug-ins go, I've never gotten anything but frustration from any of them. I use the vendor's external tools.

Tim Holloway wrote:I think you're referring to the Java files. I mean the compiled classes themselves, which, unless things have changed, are kept solely in memory in IntelliJ and only written to disk if you explicitly tell it to do so, unlike Eclipse which always compiles to disk.

Things have changed. They are always written to disk. And have been for as long as I've been using it which was version 7. Well, let me edit this with the fact that they are written to disk when you tell IDEA to compile/build. Eclipse compiles on save, which can be turned off.